Chancellor Angela Merkel, head of the Christian Democratic party CDU, arrives in Berlin for preliminary talks on forming Germany’s next government. The two parties – CDU and CSU – that make up the conservative Union bloc and the SPD are expected to discuss how much common ground there is to create a “grand coalition” like the one that governed Germany during Ms Merkel’s first term.

Angela Merkel, German chancellor and leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, looks at the party’s cyberspace drive and chats to election campaign workers at the CDU headquarters in Berlin.

German chancellor Angela Merkel at the start of a session of the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament in Berlin, looking into the handling by German security agencies of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground group

On day two of the G8 Summit at Lough Erne, leaders take a walk on Tuesday in the area around the two connected lakes in Northern Ireland. From left to right, Shinzo Abe, Japanese prime minister, Angela Merkel, German chancellor, Vladimir Putin, Russian president, David Cameron, British prime minister, Barack Obama, US president, Francois Hollande, French president, Stephen Harper, Canadian prime minister, and Enrico Letta, Italian prime minister. The leaders are meeting for talks that include the global economy and tax avoidance

Graffiti depicting Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Mario Draghi, European Central Bank president, on the fence around the construction site of the ECB’s new building in Frankfurt, which made headlines last month for its critical take on the handling of the eurozone crisis. The headquarters will be finished in 2014.

Rescue workers on a rubber boat make their way through a street flooded by the river Elbe in Meissen, eastern Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged €100m in emergency aid for flood-ravaged areas as surging waters that have claimed at least 11 lives and forced tens of thousands of evacuations across central Europe bore down on eastern Germany.

German chancellor Angela Merkel greets French president François Hollande on her arrival at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, on Thursday. They are visiting an exhibition dedicated to German painters in Paris.